How Not To Blog ?

I'm convinced that 'blogs' are a stepping stone to a much greater kind of tool just as bulletin board systems (BBSes) were a stepping stone to what is now the internet.

Slate makes mention of something similar to what I'm thinking about. They call it newsmashing, pointing to an old annotation tool called iMarkup.

An extension of the blog-as-network concept would be taking the blog itself and internetworking it out to the actual websites where they want the discussion to occur. This type of 'direct blogging' would, I believe, allow for a greater intensity to develop surrounding whatever is being blogged about.

The HowNotToBlog website would, for example, only be a gateway or placeholder to the HowNotToBlog electron cloud. Kind of like bit torrent sites (TorrentSpy.com, for example) holding only the files necessary to download what you're looking for from other locations outside of the site itself - a reference point. The HowNotToBlog .whtevr file would be downloaded from here (or anywhere) and then you would use your next-generation blog reader to browse the many other locations where HNTB conversations are taking place.

In effect, you wouldn't even need a website to blog. Just a piece of software that lets you participate in endless communities of web existence. Blogging would go from one-to-many to many-to-many. We see part of this now in community blogs like Metafilter where you have many people contributing to the community's content. However, most of the Metafilter community doesn't participate at all - they just sit and watch the conversation taking place. Immense social capital is being wasted right now simply because the tools aren't there yet. But the next generation Blog is right around the corner.

Your Blog Universe reader/writer would filter out all of the other blogs conversations, or channels, that you're not interested in, on the website you're looking at. So, each website would actually be a kind of portal to endless, networked conversations. I could go to the FoxNews website and comment on a recent article and view the comments and annotations made by others in my particular community. Persons involved in another type of public or private community (say, the conservative homemakers community) would not see my community's postings unless they chose to. The differences in preferences would insure that no communities, except for the very smallest, exist in silos.

I may have a different view of Joan's graduation photos on Flickr than her grandma Sally in Georgia. She may not want to read what I think of Joan in her high heels. It may be her granddaughter. Joan's family could see one version of the photos and comment on them, etc., and my horny toads and I could see another version with more humorous versions of the photos. As well, her family could post private information like phone numbers, messages, and additional photos without anyone else seeing. The possibilities are endless.

The reader would categorize posts and other media like photos, videos, documents, so that it's not too messy. You could also chat with others, leave session-activated private messages, view XML feeds from related sites, etc. The technology is here already. It's just not put together in such a way.

iMarkup is a nice tool, to be sure. However, it's taking us back to the 60s when Engelbart was annotating websites and couldn't do much else. I'm talking dynamic peer interaction, here. (No, Yahoo 360 won't accomplish this.)

Blogs today don't really create communities or much peer interaction, either. They're more a tool that encourages interaction with others. The next generation of blogs and blogging won't be based on websites at all. We thought of networking the BBSes and other networks together more cohesively and that was great. Now it's time to do the same for all of the disparate conversations that continue to result.